


pocket guts

by wtfmulder



Series: pocket guts [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-One Son
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-01-18 11:46:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12387435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtfmulder/pseuds/wtfmulder
Summary: Set during s6. Mulder and Scully have a lot to work in their relationship -- before it even gets to happen.Prompt: how would Scully react if Mulder dropped an open condom wrapper in front of her?





	1. Chapter 1

She misses him. This detail is what sometimes turns that steady simmer of annoyance – always present, even on their best days, it’s just elemental to feel whittled and weakened by him, just as it is to feel his necessity – into a rapid, unforgiving boil. And she loathes it as much as he does. This anger wears her down. This anger makes her stupid. She is weighed by it, can’t control it. And when she misses him, it’s even harder to rationalize. **  
**

But how could she _not_ miss him? Mulder rewrites everything she has ever known about companionship. There is a seeking missile in him that works and works to pinpoint all that Dana Scully is missing in her life, and then it works to fill it. 

And he is sweet. Oh, he is sweet. The gentler side of Mulder is actually all grit: the sandpaper of it smooths her out, those rugged, wary edges of her oscillating mistrust. He doesn’t listen. He never listens. He is his own first thought when he wakes up and he is the one he falls asleep to. He _betrayed_ her. But he helps her with her coat at the end of a long work day. He is patient with her, does not take her resentment for granted. He is a shock-absorber for her bitterness. A continent-jumper, all in her honor. He carries on with his half of their partnership as if nothing had changed, his unshakable optimism imploring her that it really hadn’t. He flirts with her. He fights with her. He gets her coffee right. 

But this morning he takes it further. She begins to wonder how deep her hostility cuts him – she begins to worry. He comes into the office in a rumpled suit, his face unshaven. He downs aspirin and coffee in three hour intervals. It had been almost a year since she had seen him this disheveled, back when he had nothing to believe in.

Except for her. 

He clings to her. In every other way but physically, finds a million different things to talk about, fills up even the healthy silences with his rambling chatter. “Scully?” he asks. Every time she takes too long to answer. “Scully?” And that total relief when she looks up to reply. He stays in the basement for lunch, eats nothing, when she tells him she brought her lunch with her. Follows her when she checks on results from the print lab. She’s annoyed, but mostly bewildered. Then there’s the physical. His hand on her back, yes, but her shoulders, too, her wrists. It bothers her that she doesn’t mind it so much. She can’t remember the last time she really had to take care of Mulder. 

“Are you alright?” she runs her hand through his hair. She misses that, too. He looks up at her, startled, but quickly molds his face into something more neutral.

“Just not feeling well, Scully.”

She doesn’t press. She’s too doubtful of her place in Mulder’s life too often, these days. But she does let him cling. She softens her voice when she speaks to him. She doesn’t brush him off, she let’s go of all of the hurt, at least for the day. He seems more than grateful for it, almost to the point of awe. It bothers her… that she doesn’t mind it so much. That she needs to be needed like this.

At the end of the day, they’re putting on their coats. Their quiet is easy and Mulder, for the most part, appears recuperated. He drapes her in her wool, like always, keeps his hands on her for a little longer than necessary. She waits for him while he slips into his suit jacket, figuring they might as well ride out together. 

“I was thinking… about those prints they lifted from the victim’s car. There’s something off about the sebaceous composition. The lab says they’ve never seen it before.” She lets him lead her to her car in the bustling garage, handing out her peace offering without the hint of a smile.  “Why don’t you come over and explain to me why that means it couldn’t possibly be terrestrial in nature?”

His face lights up. God, damn him. She feels like she’s been kicking a puppy in the same tender spots for months and months. “Scully, I thought you’d never ask.” He reaches into his pocket for his own keys. “I’ll bring pizza. You still eat that, right? If you think I’m going to argue with a Dana Scully fueled on nothing but coffee and granola – shit.” Not paying attention, his keys fall to the ground with a metal splatter.

“Here, let me – “ she bends down to scoop them up, but freezes when her eyes hit the concrete. 

That dark, primordial filth inside of her, the rigid tension in her protoplasm. She blacks out, like she always does. In these moments she only has the capacity to feel everything wrong. She slowly picks up the keys, and the empty condom wrapper along with it. 

“Scully,” Mulder says. “Scully.”

He uses too many words. The details of an event write themselves on his face so plainly. In ruined seconds she pieces out, from his guilty, avoidant eyes and the slowness with which he forms his thoughts, what happened, who it happened with. A full case report with only a mental photograph. Her grip around the keys and wrapper tightens, but he won’t take them from her. So she lets them fall back on the floor.

She never remembers what it’s like to hate someone this much. What inspires a woman to run her lover over with her car, empty out her gun into his heart, play in the meat left over. She’s in her car before she knows it, yanking the door out of his hands with less force than she meant for. In that moment, she doesn’t miss him. 


	2. Chapter 2

She stews alone, hours of picking apart the knotted cords of humiliation, justified anger and mere childish petulance. But when she gets too close to the middle, when the source of her agitation begins to reveal itself to her, she ties herself up again, takes another sip of her wine, and changes the subject in her head. The more she avoids poking any sensitive pulp, the easier it is to imagine forgetting the evening ever happened.

She will move on. Tomorrow, she will return to the office and pretend as if nothing ever happened, emboldened by her chosen rhetoric: he is human, he is weak, he is his.

He is human. He is weak. He is his.

Less compact thoughts stain the periphery, of course.  _He fucked her_ , is one, _he knew she was dirty and he fucked her_. Two glasses on an empty stomach and it’s  _that sunnuvabitch, that fucking coward, making me comfort him_. Half the bottle and her head feels clearer.  _He is human. He is weak. He is his_. Free to do as he wants, whomever he wants, but she reserves the right to question his choices if they just so happen to affect their work. It’s not her fault that whenever Mulder chooses to get involved with someone, it’s at the detriment of their partnership.

But something darker still yet lingers, all the dangerous thoughts she immediately sweeps away.  _How could he do this to me. How could he do this to us_. She thinks of his face when she told him she was leaving, her tears turning to ice on her cheeks when he passed out in her arms after coming all that way to find her. His wet hair underneath her frozen lips.

His hands on her face, thumbs stroking her temple, leaning in… they looked at each other. She isn’t _crazy_. They _looked_ at each other and _agreed._  They were going to, it was –

She forces herself to demolish that line of thinking before it becomes more than her subconscious can handle. If she allows herself to follow that line to its inevitable conclusion, she won’t forgive him. She can’t. It’s  _unforgivable._

One deep, soothing breath. Schubert on the stereo. From a seething boil of rage and confusion, she’s simmered into mild embarrassment and stern, down-the-nose disappointment. He thought he could bed the enemy. What’s new? Though she’s frankly getting sick of waiting for Mulder to pull his shit together, nagging after him like a mother who cares – from dragging him out of his pickup games to remind him his sister is still missing, to placating all the important people he’s pissed off during their time away from the files – having the work back helps. She reminds herself. He is human. He is weak. He is his.

He is at her door.

Her wine glass is on the coffee table. She is in her pajamas, her legs stretched out on the couch. The rational choice is to not to let him in. His presence shocks her into unwilling, partial sobriety, turns the pleasant warmth in her cheeks into something hot to the touch. All these years of ignoring an argument until all the important parts fade away, leaving behind a caustic afterimage – it’s unlike him to show up. She’s hoped for it a few times, sure, is left disappointed every time.

Her eyes slip shut. She listens as the rapping turns to knocking, as the knocking turns to pounding. No doubt he can see the light from the living room pouring out through the cracks, might even be able to hear her breathe with one or more of his boy-wizard senses, but this is for the best. If he is here to talk, there is nothing more to talk about.

“Scully,” he grunts, another violent disturbance to awake her sleeping neighbors. He’s just shy of beating on the door, closer to splintering the wood than he is to not. “Scully, let me in.” Right before she convinces herself to stride to the door, open it up and bodily escort him back to the street, where he can rave and rant like the lunatic he hardly keeps at bay, she’s interrupted by the turn of a key and the snick of a lock. Her eyes snap open. She flies to sit up straight, bringing her legs to the ground and tightening her robe around her body.

He stumbles in, the same brand of disheveled he’d been in the office that morning. Still in the same suit, unruly hair sticking up in spikes over his forehead. He looks at her, looks away, rubs a spot on his shadowed jaw.

She stares, incredulous. Her mouth forms words she can't get out.

He shrugs. “You didn’t let me in.” Avoiding her eyes, he surveys the floor beneath him. “Should I take my shoes off? I should take my shoes off.” He toes his shoes off despite her choked protests, painstakingly lining them up on the tile next to the door.

“Are you drunk, Mulder?” She says finally, voice wavering in her shock.

“I see we had the same idea.” He jabs a finger at the near-empty wine bottle, the glass she half-poured and was considering dumping in the sink. “We gotta talk, Scully,” he sighs, plopping down beside her on the couch.

Eyes still trained on him, she concentrates on keeping her back straight, her shoulders set. “No, Mulder. You are being ridiculous. There is nothing to talk about.”

He speaks over her, shaking his head.  “I’m not doing this anymore, Scully, I’m not.” And all the work she’s done the past few hours begins to unravel itself, tears of frustration welling in her eyes as sucks her lips into her mouth and jerks her head, no, no, refusing to move her face when he places his hand under her chin to force her to look at him. “I’m _sorry_ ,” he says, thick, raw, stroking her cheek where she won’t turn to face him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she tries, pacing her words to keep them steady.

“I need to explain it to you, I need you to know.” His hand falls to wrap around hers, but she crosses her arms over her stomach. He lets his hand fall between them on the couch, balls it up into a fist. “I need you to know it won’t happen again.”

“How many times?” She asks, hating herself for it. That’s not what she meant. That’s not what matters. “After all you found out about her – really, Mulder?” Better. That gives her the courage to whip her head around, watch him flounder for words under her hellfire gaze. “She almost convinced you to give up on your cause, side with the  _enemy_ , these people you believe orchestrated the disappearance of your sister and are the harbingers of alien colonization – and you _sleep with her?_ After meeting the smoking man in her apartment? Right after we  _just_  got the X-Files back?”

Looking sick, he answers the wrong question. “It was a few times after she showed up. I wanted… it was comforting. Familiar. I was relieved she still cared about me. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, so I stopped it when…”

“I don’t  _care_ – “ though grief and betrayal spreads through her so quickly it gives her whiplash –

“– I was discharged from the hospital in Florida and we flew back to D.C. I ended it after–”

“Why are you telling me this? None of that is my business. I want to know why you would jeopardize everything  _now._ ” But she sees the pieces falling into place, full days Mulder would almost ignore her in the bullpen. She blamed it on despondency at losing his life’s purpose, a lack of mental stimulation – but he was – while she was – she showed up every day, surveyed piles of crap when she could’ve been ascending the ranks in Utah, defended him to Kersh on a daily basis. Oh, god… she had her pay docked for the unapproved expenses in that case with Patrick Crump, did his unauthorized autopsies, played the part of good little soldier, and he… he… no. “You don’t believe me?” She uses his own words, praying he’ll get stuck on them and stop his train of useless sentiment before it wrecks them both. “After all that you’ve seen, you still don’t believe me?”

“–After I boarded that ghost ship in Bermuda,” he finishes, and his meaning flattens her lungs.

It takes her awhile to realize he’s still talking as she tries to swim from the widening chasm of agony in her heart. She called to tell me she was being reassigned. It was goodbye again. I regretted it. As it was happening, Scully. After months of keeping all sorts of truths from her, he’s suddenly an open book, and she wishes he would just… “Shut the  _fuck_  up,” she whispers.

He pauses, rearing back to glance at the whole of her, and she meets his eyes stricken with guilt. Desperation. Liquor, fever, that always-there undercurrent of determination that things will go his way, because he will make them go his way. His lips curl up into a panicked, tearful smile, and fall back down again as he reaches forward to grasp for a hand that won’t accept him. “You mean… everything to me.” His voice cracks. “Scully. God, Scully. I love you. I love you so much and I’m so sorry and I meant every word of… everything. I meant it all.”

“Were you going to tell me?” Her hand in his, bound, unable to move. “If you hadn’t dropped your keys?”

His chin wobbles. He laughs, uneven, bows his head in coward’s surrender. “Oh, Scully… I couldn’t… I can’t lose you.”

She wonders if he writes out these speeches before he approaches her.

There’s a stinging in her lower back, phantom pains of listlessness and fury. How many times has she been dragged into this cycle with his words, his hangdog eyes, his lips in her hair? 

How embarrassing.

No more. 

 _No more_.

“I think you should leave,” she whispers. She shoulders him away when he leans in, her body out of his tight grip, and furrows her brow, addressing the carpet with as much of her voice as she can muster. “Now, Mulder, if you want to see me in the morning.” There’s a still, awful silence, him waiting for time alone to bridge the gap. She says nothing.

He slowly gets up, puts on his shoes, and leaves, dazed and reeking of misery as if he never would have expected his momentous declaration to be met with so much ambivalence.

Scully finishes that half-poured glass. Throws it against the wall instead of crushing it with her bare hands. She thinks to herself,  _he better get fucking used to it._


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mulder and Scully have a lot of work to do to repair their relationship – before it even gets to happen.

It starts with a realization. She’s looking at her body in the mirror, smoothing down folds in her skirt, tucking her shirt in. The alarm clock on her nightstand tells her she’s right on schedule. She won’t be going to the office late, nor will she be going in early. She will be right on time. **  
**

Her eyes catch on her hips, her hands firmly rested on the flare, then they sit on her belly. Comparing herself to all the many shapes of Diana is a tempting form of wallowing. She’s no stranger to it. _I can’t deny the satisfaction one might gather from an ally whose beliefs are in total alignment with yours,_  she’d thought when his mind started running off, then his body, chasing leads hand-in-hand with Agent Fowley. Then it was _She has the files_. That’s when she had to convince herself it wasn’t a competition.

After touching up her hairspray, she swipes her thumb under her lips to catch any rebellious lipstick. It isn’t a competition. It never was. Diana Fowley is as real and reliable as any case they’ve come across in the basement filing cabinet. The ultimate fact of Diana is that she is a traitor. To Mulder. To her country. To her  _species_. Scully doesn’t look in the mirror and compare herself to a traitor.

She thinks of the chip in her neck, the black book of phone numbers sitting in her suitcase. She knows half of them are disconnected. Her fingers twitch around her cross, and she fights the urge to throw up.

She has to sit down. Feel the bed underneath her palms, and later she’ll take an ibuprofen to alleviate the tension headache building behind her temples. Unbridled panic is the marrow of her body.

She will have to deal with this. There is no way she can’t. Not an aspect of her life exists which does not somehow belong to Mulder. To recognize that the sentiment is no longer mutual, that it never was, frightens her. She cannot pinpoint the exact moment she decided to place all of her bets on Mulder. The fantasy that plays of her opening their door and taking a seat like nothing ever happened, that she doesn’t know what she knows now, will remain only a fantasy.

Her actions as  _fidelity._  His as _infidelity_. Her cheeks flush with the shame of it all. When she does think of Diana, Scully wonders. Had she laughed?

Her watch tells her she’s two minutes late on the elevator, four minutes by the time she reaches the basement. His brand new name plate on the door greets her before he does, and walls close in on her trachea. She traces it with a trimmed fingernail, scrapes lightly through the middle – slowly, lost in thought. A decision is made for a that dilemma plagued her off and on. Her mind guilded over, she swivels on her heel with her suitcase still in hand.

The application process is quick, standing and scribbling over the receptionist’s desk at HR, and by the time she’s signed her name she’s thinking of what sort of houseplants might thrive on the third floor and if she’ll have time to care for them properly. If her mom still has that picture of her, Melissa and Bill shoving snow down each other’s shirts in Yokosuka. Which books will travel with her, and which ones will she need to make photocopies of? She’ll need to make copies of certain case files, too. And all the reference guides she always forgets to bring in from home, those will have a space now.

It’s the most reasonable decision she’s made in half a decade, which means it’s the one he’ll give her the most trouble for. She rips off the bandaid, opens the door and waves at him, throws him a flat smile when she dumps her suitcase on her table in the back corner.

His legs fly off the desk at the sight of her and he pulls himself to sit up straight, rolling his chair back. He’d been staring at the ceiling, face shadowed, eyes glazed over in black thought. Face blank, eyes red and wide open. “Scully, you’re uh…” He leans over to check the clock. “Late.”

She turns her head to look at the clock, clears her throat, and turns back prepare herself for the work day. She pulls out her pens and calculator, a few receipts from the Arcadia experience, and nods with her back to him. “I am. I had some paperwork to fill out this morning.” There’s a beat of silence, him waiting for her to elaborate. She sighs. Gets ready to rip off another bandaid.

Looking at him is not the challenge she expected it to be. This is Mulder sitting in front of her, who at least had the decency to put on a new suit and run a comb through his hair before showing up to work this morning. Looking at him makes her realize she doesn’t doubt he loves her, not at all.

She considers her words carefully. From what place are they coming from? Does she want to hurt him?

She does. She wants to sink her teeth into his neck and separate skin from muscle to keep him still. There’s an urge to open him up and extract all the goodness she’s ever tried to bring to his life, take it back for herself. She wants to ask him when he first realized he was in love with her. If Diana took her children and do you know Mulder where I might find them. She wants to tell him he should have never given her information she can’t do anything with.

More surprisingly, she doesn’t want to hurt him. She wants to stop herself from hurting. She puts long pauses between all of her sentences, hoping that each one will grant him some time to think, to understand.

“As you know, Bureau pathologists not operating in Quantico are offered… space, granted their division requires the use of their medical skills for a majority of their cases.” She bumps her rear against the table and folds her arms over her chest, eyes trained on the wall behind him. “Office space.” He doesn’t answer. “I applied for an office this morning.”

After a long silence, it’s apparent that her thought-out delivery hasn’t met its mark. He laughs uneasily, pulls himself closer to the desk with small jerks of his rolling chair. “But you have an office, Scully.”

“I don’t even have a desk, Mulder,” she says – another thing that brings her shame, that she’s let this go on for so long. How could she expect Mulder to ever treat her with respect if she never demanded it? “I don’t even have my name plate on the door. This is not my office.”  
  
“We’ll get you a desk. We’ll get you a name plate.” Another off-key chuckle and he throws open his desk drawer, shuffling through papers, tossing files on the floor and pushing assorted objects over in his haste to retrieve what is probably a requisition slip. “We’ll order that right now. I don’t know why they didn’t add your name up there, I just showed up this morning and staff had already nailed it up.”

“No,” she shakes her head. “No, none of that is necessary. I have already submitted the application. I’ll know for sure by next Friday, but it is very unlikely to be denied.”

“You know where we keep the supplies request form? I thought I had a few stored in here.” He bumps his elbow into his coffee mug and it spills. “Shit, one moment.” He wipes at it with all the extra paper, cursing when it spreads underneath the keyboard.

“You know damn well why my name plate wasn’t on that door,” she says, incensed by his refusal to listen. He throws all the wet balls of paper to the ground and kicks a dent into the metal trash can.

“We’re fucking  _partners_.” He runs his hand through his hair and kicks the can again, hard, sending it flying across the linoleum. He whips around to face her, stalking up until they’re nearly pressed together and she’s forced to look up at him. His hot breath in her hair would be fire if he could muster it.  “How am I supposed to speak with you about a case?”

“You e-mail me. You instant message me. You call me. I’ll be three floors up, Mulder. It’s not like I’m transferring divisions.”

“The _files are all down here_. Everything is down here. ”

“They were all uploaded by Agents Spender and Fowley into a storage database, a precautionary measure after the fire.” Her voice doesn’t cringe when she mentions Diana, but Mulder sure does. The tic in his jaw pulses like mad, and he violently shakes his head.

“This isn’t about desks and name plates. You would have told me way sooner if it bothered you this much.”  
  
“I believe I tried to do that once. You laughed at me.”

His eyes flash at the memory, crags of feral lightning. He shakes his head again, drawing even closer, putting his hands on her shoulders. “No, that’s not what this is. What are you doing?”  
  
“Get off of me, Mulder. I’m not doing anything, except demanding adequate space for the endless amount of work I do for the fucking X-Files.”

She imagines she must be rather transparent, not looking him in the eye when his hand goes under her chin. The closeness of him, the scent of his Old Spice cologne clinging to his neck, the coffee he had just spilled, all of it makes her head swim and her stomach clench around the nothing she’s eaten today. She doesn’t quite think of Mulder being close to Diana like this, of him holding her. Burying his nose in her hair. Kissing her. But even now, his body thrumming with anxiety and barely restrained ire, he's so tender. It’s in the back of her head, what it must have been like for the two of them, and she hates being so close.

“You’re pulling away from me,” he murmurs softly, sliding his hand from under her chin to brush over her hair. In her head, she’s flipping through catalogues for a custom made desk chair.


	4. Chapter 4

Her office is neither spacious nor is it conveniently located, but it is hers. Her name embossed in gold greets her before she’s been given the grand tour. She takes to the transition with all the excitement of moving away from home for the first time, lining stock walnut furniture with her texts and her supply holders, the filing cabinets with photocopied case information. She adjusts her chair perfectly to her liking, puts up her family photos, her quirky _Dog of the Month_ calendar, fiddles with the blinds to let some light in,  and the finishing touch: she hammers her degrees to the wall with the nails hanging out of her mouth, spearing herself into building. 

Mulder pops his head in as she stands back with her arms crossed, admiring her own work. She’s hoping and praying the plant tucked in the corner will stay alive, understanding that it probably won’t. She’s got her own computer, brand new, and a desk that is clean, a corkboard unlittered by notes she doesn’t understand, snippets from magazine articles she never got the chance to fully read, photos and witness drawings she didn’t get to buy under the table at some seedy restaurant, or in the back of an unlit parking garage.

It’s comfortable. Like home. She stares at her diplomas stacked one over the other, now free of the dust that had coated them. 

“Well,” she says, her back to him. “What do you think?” 

He slides into a carver chair, his shadow moving across the slats of light peeking in from the window. The stiff leather huffs a breath underneath his weight, pants as he shuffles to get comfortable. “I think…I can cut an hour out of my exercise routine with all the walking it takes to get here.” 

Holding her breath, she looks up at him, not surprised to find him unsmiling. His entire bearing screams discomfort, his long legs stuffed between the chair and her desk, the sharp eyes of a profiler idling from one corner to another, then dulling, giving up. They land on her face and she sees the lack of sleep, reality suspended in the haze of fatigue. Sitting across from her, he’s lost. Abandoned. 

Sudden, uncontrollable guilt makes her turn away from the questions he asks of her with that one look. The notion is absurd – she never _abandoned him_. One week after Mulder visited her apartment and they’ve fallen into a cautious, yet breathable routine, though the date of her move loomed over their heads as an unspeakable inevitability. Or at least, that is what it had been for her. If Mulder had somehow convinced himself it wasn’t happening, that is not her problem. 

Sliding into her chair, high-backed and well-oiled, she lets the silence kick him into shape, donning a neutral, closed-off expression normally reserved for everyone who wasn’t him. 

His shoulders slump. His eyes quit their begging. “That’ll be useful,” he offers finally, reaching out to pat the monitor. “I was meaning to talk to you about getting one for the basement.” 

“It’ll cut back on a lot of wasted time, waiting for any of the labs to pick up the phone and call us with the results. We won’t have to call Skinner or show up at his office for every little red-tape issue we run into on a case.” She types a random pattern on the keyboard, trying a smile. “We can argue over whether a chain letter prognosticating the unfortunate details of my mother’s death merits a trip down to computer forensics.” 

The joke falls flat, punctuated by her index finger tapping _j j j j j_ as she waits in vain for a response. Her clock is loud as it counts out the minutes it takes for him to say something. 

“What do you want?” He asks hoarsely. 

Her finger stops its tapping, and gooseflesh travels in waves down the length of her arms. _I want to look at you and not see you choose her_. The thought comes so quick it’s easy to stomp, like a skittish, clumsy spider. But like spiders, thoughts arrive in swarms at their birth, and she cannot kill them all. When he calls her resentment to the surface, the accumulated hurt pops like egg sacs. She does try her best to be fair.

“Mulder,” she says, “I told you, not too long ago, that the X-Files were personal to me. That if you take away the personal interest… there is no reason to continue.”

She tilts her head, watching him grow wary. His lips tighten into a thin, white line, and he’s not quite looking at her but somewhere close, somewhere right above her head. It would be all too easy to drop this line of thinking, let it die with all the other conversations they’ve killed. 

But in this room, it’s her name on the door. And it pains her to see him sitting there, panicking at her audacity to give voice to her feelings when he’s been torturing with his.  It all comes out of her, not like a burst dam. She controls the pressure, the temperature.  
  
“I am missing months of my life, almost an entire season, with little to no recollection of what happened to me during the time I was gone.” He squirms, straightens, and drops his mouth into a frown, evidently surprised at the turn of conversation. She plows on. “While I have no memory with which to guide me, the atrocities committed on my body serve as my sole reminder. I have reason to believe the men who orchestrated my abduction are the same ones who infected me with cancer.” 

He flinches. She doesn’t. She’s been having this conversation with herself for months, in her shower, in bed late at night. “ _Cancer_. Using technology that has no basis in modern terrestrial scientific advancement, they were able to take the most basic functional units of my body and turn them against each other. For months, I had to live with the knowledge that not only was I going to die, but die horribly, wasting away while all whom I loved were forced to watch and do nothing.” 

Catching the wavering of her voice, she takes a moment to pause, to breathe, to let him breathe. When she continues, his hand reaches out to envelop hers, warm and familiar, but she folds her hands in her lap. “Except for you. You saved my life, using the very same technology that might have been responsible for my illness. And Mulder, I am so grateful to you for that. For that, and for every other time you’ve faced and defeated indomitable odds to protect me. To save me. To keep me with you.” 

_With you_. Words stick, and they burn. All things together, always. But that had never been the case. Is that why she can’t shake this? Is that why, when his eyes meet hers over a file, or when his fingers brush her lower back as they breeze through a door – is that why she can’t get over this? 

Because someone else had clamored to the same spot as her, beat her, even, without any of the suffering? Without any of the fucking _work?_

Stop it, Dana. “I’ve lost a sister, just like you have. I’ve lost a child. I’ve lost my autonomy, because there’s not a day that goes by I don’t wonder about what happened to me, or who has access to the chip that’s keeping me alive. I’m a marked woman in every sense. 

“So, Mulder. You were right. I was making this personal. I am making this personal. Because this work is my work. I take it very seriously. I guard it with my life – I have _been_ guarding it with my life. And right now, I need you to do something for me. In order to make this work, I need you to listen to me.” She swallows and loses the ability to blink, her eyes staring hard and wet at the closed door. “I need _you_ to stop making this so personal. I cannot continue to – I can’t work like this. Please. If you owe me anything, Mulder, it’s this. _Stop_ looking at me like that. _Stop_ making this into something it’s not. This is not a punishment. I am not being mean, nor am I abandoning you.”

When his chair scrapes back and his body looms over hers, she doesn’t close her eyes until he’s kneeling beside her, bringing both hands to rest on her straining arm.

“Did you even listen to me?” She asks desperately, groaning in disbelief. “Did you hear a word I just said?”

“I did. Of course I did. Scully, I know what you’ve sacrificed. I see it every time I look at you and it has scared the hell out of me for so long.” He pries every one of her fingers from the armrest, just for her to dig them back in again. “It scared the hell out of me until you became the only thing I could look forward to. I refuse to believe this was ruined before it even had the chance to begin.” His voice shakes, and his head. “You can’t tell me that, Scully. You _can’t_.” Tightening his grip, he scoots his knees closer. If it wouldn’t cause both of them to collapse, she’s sure he’d hug the chair. They’ve been touching less. She walks too fast for him to get his hands on her.

“There was nothing to ruin,” she scoffs. 

He looks at her sadly, with more skepticism than she herself could ever muster, and strokes her arm once more before drawing back to stand up. 

She’s booting up her computer when he bends down again, planning on ignoring anything that’s not shop talk, but the crinkle of a plastic bag catches her attention. “I… got you something.” Pulling out a taped white box from the bag, he bites his lip. He weighs the box with his hand, a hesitance consuming his features she so rarely gets to see. “A housewarming gift.” He slides it on her desk. She glares at it, unmoving.  
  
“I’ll uh… I’ll let you open it.” He nods to her, finally starting to back out of the office. “Expect me to call when I hear something about that highway robbery we’ve been looking into.” 

Mulder’s long gone by the time curiosity kills her resentment, and when she tears open the box and dislodges the bubblewrap, she’s left with a bobblehead. Lime green with an antenna, possessing two huge, almond-shaped eyes. 

She smacks the alien once on its quivering head, annoyance climbing her nerves three scleroses at a time. Clutter. Stupid kitschy childish _tacky_ clutter that doesn’t belong in _her_ office. The thought of ripping it apart by the spring and chucking it out the window gives her a brief, yet intense rush of pleasure, but she takes a deep breath, scoops it up, and slams it into her bottom drawer instead. She locks it up tight.


	5. Chapter 5

The relationship she’s built with Karen Kosseff is more comfortable than she ever thought possible. Giving voice to her worst fears and most taxing frustrations to a complete stranger initially struck terror deep inside of her, but she’d been given no choice after her abduction. Since the first breakthrough she’s come to trust Agent Kosseff with her feelings in a way she’s never trusted anyone before. Sessions are sporadic if they’re not mandatory – and she’d just come off a bout of mandated counseling after being shot by Agent Ritter – but she always went into them knowing that being completely honest would not only help her feel lighter, but more rational. **  
**

Sitting upright on the smoky leather fainting couch, words are evading her. The wound that Ritter left behind is healed on her belly, and the nightmares she’s been having, dreams of being the last person on earth, the view of her surroundings obstructed by the viewfinder of a camera, those dreams are subsiding, replaced with the more customary grotesque visions. Blackened, solid bodies turning to ash under her delicate touch. Her sister’s voice calling out from behind many doors, from the small, crushed windpipes of a very young girl. She doesn’t fear these dreams like the did the viewfinder nonsense.

And that fear pales in comparison to the dread that consumes her now.

“There is something bothering me,” Scully says finally, studying her hands in her lap. “Something that I can hardly bear to express.” 

“This is a safe place for you to do just that,” Karen says. She waits patiently as Scully recalls the details from the last few days, picking and choosing the safest content to dole out. It’s not the healthiest way to approach therapy, but some subjects are just impossible to broach. 

Karin Berquist, one shade paler in death, eyes that had once been so averse to the light forever shut against its prodding. Her missing, matted fur and gentle, intuitive gaze. 

When had she become such a raging _bitch_?

She left Mulder in his nest when she should have stayed. She knows the weight of his guilt, what it does to his shoulders, his back, his heart, and she knows what he had needed from her. Reaching out to him with her words and reassurances, surprised to find that she meant them, but only reaching out, never making contact. 

It felt unnatural, the way she hadn’t pulled him to her. When his voice gets that quiet it fills her with alarm bells, ones that are still ringing in her head as she sits in silence of Karen’s office. It eats at her more and more. 

She’s a mean person. A _bad_ person.

She rubs her hand over her mouth, resting it over her jaw and propping her head up as she stares blankly at Karen’s legs. Territorial and intuitive are a dangerous combination for any species. Her and Karin Berquist might have been more kindred than she let herself believe at first; she certainly plays the part of animal very well.

And then there’s the worst of it. The bone-chilling, life-altering revelation that makes her want to howl at the moon. The reason she made this appointment. 

She doesn’t trust Mulder.

She doesn’t trust her _partner_. 

This is what she relates to Karen Kosseff. 

“Well, Dana, you certainly wouldn’t be the first agent to profess a lack of faith in their partner,” the counselor reassures, her wide, dark eyes unblinking. “In fact, the Bureau offers an assortment of programs dedicated to address that very issue, simply because it happens so often. I know that you two attended the team building seminar they hosted last year.” 

“Actually, we didn’t,” Scully hastily corrects. “We were unable to attend due to unforeseen circumstances regarding… a case.” 

Mild surprise registers on Karen’s face; she doesn’t attempt to mask it. “Well, that might be a place to start, then. But I believe the next one isn’t happening until this time next year.” A little bit of rearranging, one pantsuited leg crossing over the other. “We tend to categorize trust into three major categories: predictability, dependability, and faith.” 

“Can we expect anything to be predictable in this line of work?” Scully asks, genuinely perplexed. “Doesn’t the very basis of the job require us to expect the unexpected?”

“Well, the entire psychology of assigning partners instead of simply pairing agents up on a case-by-case basis rests on the idea that if nothing else is constant, you can trust that your partner will remain constant. The work is unpredictable. Not the partnership.” 

Scully rubs her thighs, lost in thought. Nothing about this year has been predictable, from losing and regaining the files in such a short time, finding out the true identity of the smoking man, her being stung by that bee and then abducted a second time. Within a week’s time she’d found herself on the verge of quitting, then being awash with a devotion so potent it stupefied all the sense out of her. The appearance and disappearance of Gibson Praise. Diana Fowley.

The ditching had been worse than ever. Her hands stop at her knees and she holds them tight. All the times he ran off with Agent Fowley to seek his truth, forgetting it was no longer just his. The times he had cut her out on purpose… because he didn’t trust her, either. Not when she refused to spoonfeed him lies. 

Then some days he would give up entirely, leave work early to shoot hoops, catch his games at any of the assorted local bars, all day movie sessions with the gunmen. But some days he got so desperate for the work he’d put it all on the line for just a taste of it, digging through garbage for his fix or flying all the way out to Bermuda with just a map, his cellphone and his wallet. 

But… it had been getting better, too. He kept her in the loop more than ever. He was more communicative, sooner, so she at least knew where he was if ended up needing her help. When he met with sources, he dragged her along too, refusing to take no for an answer. Kroner, Kansas, the naval experiments, Rachel, Nevada. 

When faced with the decision to run off with Diana to the El Rico air base or check on Cassandra Spender, he chose Scully. 

Salvageable. It’s salvageable. She breathes a sigh of relief, eyes briefly closing, and she tables predictability for another time. 

“I depend very much on Mulder,” she says, a spark of hope lighting within her. “I depend on him to back me up in life-or-death situations, and he’s never let me down in that regard. I depend on him to tell me the truth.” 

“And does he?” Karen asks, cocking her head. “Tell you the truth?” 

_Were you going to tell me? If you hadn’t dropped your keys?_

_Oh, Scully. I couldn’t – I can’t lose you._

She licks her lips. “In almost every way it matters.” 

Karen nods slowly, but Scully doesn’t elaborate. The counselor’s eyes narrow and she flips through the file in front of her. “Okay then. We’ve talked about dependability before, when you were dealing with your cancer. You didn’t want to lean on him because you feared he would assume you’re giving up. It’s been a year and a half since then. Do you still feel a reluctance to lean on him for support?” 

One dead girl, the heaviness of an empty womb. She hasn’t… she hasn’t even told him about her infertility. “I know that if I needed it, he’d be there,” she whispers. It’s not a lie. 

“That’s a good sign, Dana,” Karen says. “I know that you both have been through so much.” Scully nods, once. “That brings us to faith, then.” 

Her nails bite into her slacks as she drags them back up to her thighs. It stings a little. 

“I have,” she says, “a lot of faith in Mulder.” 

Not since the moment she met him has she ever doubted he would find the truth he seeks. Not since he returned to her with that chip and gifted her the rest of her life has she seriously doubted that she would be there to seek it with him.  

“A lot of faith,” she repeats. 

Before she’d been reconnected with Father McCue, she remembers the feelings of rage she’d held toward God when she was sick. Not just rage. Utter bewilderment. _How could He let this happen?_

_How could he let this happen?_

“Oh, god,” Scully chokes, her eyes brimming and warm. “How do we fix this?”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so this is the end of the first segment of this series. The next installation will be titled "The Incision," and will include more of Mulder's POV.

Unfortunately there’s not much else she can work out with Karen, not without hashing through the embarrassing details.  _My partner admitted he loved me and sometimes I want to shoot him_  just doesn’t want to come out. The takeaway advice is great, but too generic: talk out your problems as they come, consider this printed out list of tried-and-true Bureau-approved trust building tactics, and take the next seminar more seriously when it comes around. She’d be more equipped to handle it if Mulder had held a knife to her throat and declared allegiance to Zeta Reticuli. **  
**

So she ignores it, ignores Mulder. Nothing gets better except the work. She had missed the X-Files, and sinking her scalpel back into meat of the undiscovered helps her forget. The cases they work are tailormade for her – and if this is his way of wooing her, drawing her back into his arms with the seductive call of science, Scully refuses to pay that any mind. Everything about him insults her. His flirting especially: suggestive comments which used to secretly thrill her feel inappropriate. Flippant and careless. She could’ve shot him when he waved those condoms at her. But more disturbing is the way he walks on eggshells around her. He doesn’t argue, and when he does it lacks its customary bite, the thing that makes her want to push back, that makes her want to prove him.

Pinker Rawls with all of his dust and rage, all of the unanswered questions he leaves behind, has her pooring over her case notes long after they’re back in D.C., shooting off emails to anyone who might want to discuss it with her: well known biochemists, doctors who specialize in treating burn victims. In fact, the cases they’re picking up catch the attention of all the other pathologists on her floor. Her bodies are the best bodies, the most interesting bodies – they explode and they twitch and they’re filled to the brim with substances unidentifiable.

Agent Larson, senior field pathologist with the FBI, possesses the air of a man desperately awaiting retirement and lends himself eagerly as an extra pair of trained eyes whenever something interesting comes her way. His staunch disregard of all things supernatural rivals her own, and somehow this restores a balance inside of her. It reminds her how much her mind has expanded since being assigned to The X-Files. She has Mulder to thank for that. But really – would he give a shit? Would he scoff at the very notion of Dana Scully perhaps being less intellectually rigid than he assumed?

“No.” Larson lifts his face away from the microscope, rubbing aggravatedly at his salt-and-pepper stubble. Lines form between his eyebrows, deeper ones at the corners of his mouth, and his normally alert blue eyes glaze over in contemplation. “I can’t tell you what this is just yet, but I know damn sure it isn’t what you’re telling me.”

“Aquagenic urticaria, while rare, isn’t unheard of,” she argues, straightening up in her stool. “We don’t know why it happens, but some individuals  _are_  allergic to water, and will break into hives any time it happens to touch their skin.”

“But that’s not what you just told me. You just told me that that it’s not the human that’s allergic to the water, but the water that’s allergic to the human.”

It does sound ridiculous. She gives a sheepish nod, wondering how the hell Mulder lives with sounding this absurd every day of his life. “You saw it for yourself on the slide. Those skin cells…”

“Were completely hydrophobic. I know.” He sighs and scratches again at his beard, a glint of gold shining under the low lab lights. “The way that keratinocyte repelled that drop of water… if it were true, that man would be parting the Red Sea.”

She stays silent, not wishing to alert him how close that is to the truth. She’s not a fan of how condescending he gets, but no one reacts well to all the crazy happenings they come across in the files. With her eyes back to the scope, his chin hovering over her shoulder as she fiddles with the focus knob, she doesn’t notice the door open, nor does its metal whine or the soft pad of footsteps sound out over the whirring of overworked machinery.

Something brushes over the center of her back through her lab coat and she freezes, face hot with budding fury. It feels suspiciously like a hand.

“Why, Agent Mulder,” Larson greets jovially. He scoots his stool away from the counter and stretches, offering his hand to Mulder with a hearty grin. “It’s been a long time since Quantico, yeah? From star pupil to heading his own unit.”

“I don’t actually remember what you taught,” Mulder says. Her eyes drift shut, and she lets out air from her lips like a steam kettle. Mulder’s hand doesn’t move from her back. It presses in harder. Larson doesn’t get his handshake.

It lasts forever. The good doctor doesn’t inch his way out of the room until after a few minutes of tense conversation, the fake pleasantries (on his end) losing their softness when Mulder goes into the details of the case.

“We think the man we’re looking for has a supernatural ability to separate water at the molecular level,” he explains, voice completely flat.

Agent Larson opens his mouth and closes it again. Opens it and closes it. “That’s preposterous,” he says, looking only at Scully. “Like Moses.”

“ _Exactly_  like Moses,” Mulder agrees, stroking her coat with a purposeful thumb.

She’s going to fucking kill him.

“There’s nothing… in the evidence… that has brought us to that conclusion,” she tries, remembering how pathologists talk when they find living people to gossip with. She wants to cover her face with her hands. She stares at her little collection of skin cells instead, reaches out to play uselessly with the turret.

“It’s all normal, run-of-the-mill science stuff, right?” Mulder asks, picking up one of her slides and tapping it against her shoulder. It would be playful but it makes her blood boil, and she knows he’s not feeling all that chummy either.  “That’s why you’ve been looking at these same samples for more than a day. Just poooorin’ over evidence that makes perfect sense in the realm of logic and reason.” A pause. He lowers his voice. “That  _is_ why you’ve been  in the lab all day, right?”

“Well, Dana, it seems like you two know what you’re looking for,” the older man says awkwardly, swinging his legs over the stool and pushing it back under the table. Scully barely notices him through the haze of red blurring her vision. “I’m afraid this goes way beyond my expertise.”

When the heavy door clunks behind him, Scully whips around in her seat, a gale of wrath in humiliation whirling inside of her.  

“What the hell was that?” She seethes, breathing hard through her rage. She jumps out of her chair and crowds him, jabbing a finger into his chest as he tries to back away from her. “I don’t even know how to _begin_ with how  _disgustingly_ inappropriate your behavior was!”

She backs him up all the way against a humidity cabinet, and he goes. The heartache, the insecurity, the deception that creaks in her bones in the morning when she gets out of bed, the confusion, everything she’d tried to keep a lid on in order to preserve their precious partnership. It all screams at her in a tangle of passion as her fists fly to his chest. “You’re – such a – _fucking_ – jerk!”

He says nothing, doesn’t even try to stop her, and it hits her – he likes this. He  _wants_ to be punished. She muffles her own scream by gnawing on her lower lip as she brings her fists to a halt, letting them slide down his chest with a stomp of defeat. He grabs onto one hand and brings it back, their harsh breath falling into sync.

“Nothing else is working,” he pants, wrapping his hand hard around her tightly clenched fingers. It hurts. He squeezes harder when she tries to wrench away, brushes his lips against her stiff knuckles.

“So you waltz down here and try to ruin my day… on purpose?” She asks, horrified. He shakes his head, not moving his mouth away from her skin.

Then his eyes narrow, and at least something starts to feel right. She’s grown sick of seeing them soft and round.

“I came up here to check on what you’ve found out from that sample we collected… which I have to do because you won’t bring it down to the basement,” he reminds her, annoyed. He drops her hand and crosses his arms defensively over his chest, sinking closer and closer to the metal behind him.

“And you were a complete _prick_  to a friend and colleague,” she spits. “You made me look like a fool.”

He shifts, uncomfortable, chewing mercilessly on his bottom lip. Looking at her, then away. “Agent Larson. He’s a friend of yours.”

Anxious. Fidgety, like his skeleton is gearing up to pop out of his skin. Her eyes widen when it hits her – he’s  _jealous_. 

“You implied that I was sleeping with him,” she works out, examining that awful conversation under a new lens. Her stomach rolls, and she smacks him in the chest again. “In  _front_  of him! That is unacceptable, Mulder! I have to report to him!”

“It… was wrong of me,” he admits, sucking and gnawing on his cheek until it hollows out.

_Jealous._ Jealous. Mulder is _jealous._  It’s all she can think about. She’s petty and awful for the delight she feels, but he is  _jealous,_  and there is nothing worse than being  _jealous_.

There’s too much going on in her mind to really sit and consider the maturity of it, that she takes pleasure in inflicting pain on Mulder. That it excites her as it enrages her. His actions really are unacceptable: possessive, misogynistic, crude. Dehumanizing, stripping her away of her professionalism and undermining her work. And to be jealous of  _Agent Larson?_ With whom she shared less chemistry with than A.D. Kersh?

But her wounds are licked. She feels cured.

“I am not yours,” she says. She can’t stop herself. She should be telling him to butt out altogether, not fanning the flame of his anxiety, not giving him a reason to worry. This is not about who is sleeping with who, as long as no one’s fucking the enemy. This is about trust, integrity… He looks ready to argue her point bitterly, pulling away from the cabinet to size her up, and it spurs her on, fills her with cold, vengeful fight. “ _I am not yours_ , Mulder.” She cocks her head and pins him with her mocking eyes, her chest swelling with power. “You know that, right?”

Being mean stirs her into near giddiness, near _arousal,_ a warmth lighting in her chest and just barely reaching lower, and watching him unable to look at her just makes it better. Alluring. She feels alluring, and sick of herself, and in charge. She’d tried to ignore him, to take space for herself which was desperately needed, but he whined the whole way through, made it difficult, made her the bad guy. She tried counseling herself out of her feelings. Everything made her feel powerless up until this moment.

When he had done what he did, had he been this angry with her? Was it revenge that had driven him into Diana’s bed, and if it felt this good to hurt her this badly, could she even fault him?

“I have the freedom – should I choose to exercise it – to do whatever I want.” The ‘who’ is implied. “I’m asking you to extend to me the same courtesy you would extend to yourself.”

“You don’t want to do what I did to myself,” he warns, his face carefully blank. That’s Mulder stung if she ever saw it. “You end up having to live with it.”

She sees every night he hasn’t slept, all the punishments he’s laid upon his own body. Not enough food, bruised knuckles from the bag. She sees the desperation, the utter lack of control, of understanding. 

She huffs out an angry laugh.

“I look  _forward_  to it,”  she replies. She pivots on her heel and leaves him there with her slides and her microscope, but most definitely alone.


End file.
